Mathematical Diversions

A collection of mathematical miscellany that diverts me from my main research interests. Some of the posts are interesting (to me) mathematical problems with their solutions. Others are mostly recreational things that distracted me at one time or another. The intended audience for posts in this category are my sole self, and so I make no great effort to polish the writing. Do send me an email with questions if you find anything here interesting or confusing.

Apologies if this post is shoddily written; I mainly just wanted to record an explicit counterexample before I forget it, and this post …

In a previous post we discussed a little problem in "almost" Finsler geometry. In this post we will dissect some properties …

This post is inspired by: In the diagram a 1 meter rod, initially horizontal, rotates 90-degrees about endpoint B & then translates …

Summary of the Jacobi iteration method in numerical linear algebra, and some caveats.

Since the COVID-19 crisis and the university moving to online instruction, I've spent too much time programming WeBWorK assignments. …

Let's start with something simple: Given a circle with radius $R$, draw a concentric circle with radius 1 larger. How much longer is …

Here's a slightly non-obvious relation between some angles, that I ran into accidentally. Claim: (angles below given in degrees) \[ …

A short note about an implicit assumption behind the notion of expectation values, and how it relates to economics applications.

As we all learned in a first course in PDEs, for "reasonable" initial data $u_0$, the solution to the linear heat equation …

Some non-intuitive facts about periodic functions